Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/312

 306 Roller Tragiker, should be correctly designated as " Goethe's Iphigenie in its relation to Euripides' drama Iphigenia in Tauris" and the small eighth, Komiker, as " Goethe's Vogel as related to the Birds by Aristophanes." Belonging together, these nine chapters should have been put in succession as they form one group of topics. The other group is made up of the following six chapters: III. Homer; X. Pindar; XI. Platon; XIII. Andere Dichter; XIV. Prosaiker; XV. Romer. The placing of the chapters in these two groups lifts the confusion, indicates the contents better, and at the same time reveals the double point of view in Maass' arrangement. Maass' first chapter refers to the very early tale, Der neue Paris, Knabenmarchen, related by Goethe in the second book of Dichtung und Wahrheit (Goethes Werke, Weimar ed., I, 26:78-99). In Satyr os y another youthful work is discussed. To the four page fragment Nausikaa (Goethes Werke, Weimar ed., I, 10:99-102), Maass devotes eighty large pages. Mignon und Harfner is called Goethe's 'Oedipodee' (a word coined by Maass, p. 374). Gb'tz is related to Shakspere's Antony and Cleopatra and to the Paris-Helena-Oinone story particularly as told by Loen (for Loen, see Maass, p. 33 and Keller, p. 17). Nearly one-fifth of the book is given to the second and third acts of the second part of Faust. In the second group, including its three main chapters (Plato, Pindar, Homer), discussion of larger coherent parts of Goethe's works as affected by classical writers, is replaced by a treatment seeking to uncover the fragmentary influence of Plato (here Egmont is brought in as under Plato's influence), etc., on Goethe, also by way of citations including those from Goethe's own utterances. Citations of the latter are not com- plete or systematic, a deficiency Dr. Keller undertakes to remedy. To the ambition of writing a literary style, a good deal of lucidity is sacrificed by Maass; perhaps this accounts for the arbitrariness of a number of his theories set forth especially in the first third of the book, for his sharp polemic here against opponents' theories, for his being in these parts vainglorious and vaunting, for his disdain here of fact-gatherers and their collections, for his condescending animadversions here of Goethe scholars, for lecturing and reprimanding them in these parts. Maass is carried away by his enthusiasm to read into Goethe's writings, wherever he can, allusions to Greek writers. He even has a chapter on 'Tassos Epos,' because the Italian poet was influenced by the ancients and he in turn influenced Goethe. In addition to his excellent first-hand knowledge of the classical literatures, Maass' great merit lies in those of his